Edgar Rice Burroughs
as I let my imagination run riot among the possibilities for which this clicking instrument might stand.
Some poor devil at the unknown other end might be in dire need of succor. The very franticness of the instrument's wild clashing betokened something of the kind.
And there sat I, powerless to interpret, and so powerless to help!
It was then that the inspiration came to me. In a flash there leaped to my mind the closing paragraphs of the story I had read in the club at Algiers:
Does the answer lie somewhere upon the bosom of the broad Sahara, at the ends of two tiny wires, hidden beneath a lost cairn?
The idea seemed preposterous. Experience and intelligence combined to assure me that there could be no slightest grain of truth or possibility in your wild tale—it was fiction pure and simple.
And yet where were the other ends of those wires?
What was this instrument—ticking away here in the great Sahara—but a travesty upon the possible!
Would I have believed in it had I not seen it with my own eyes?
And the initials—D. I.—upon the slip of paper! David's initials were these—David Innes.
I smiled at my imaginings. I ridiculed the assumption that there was an inner world and that these wires led downward through the earth's crust to the surface of Pellucidar. And yet—
Well, I sat there all night, listening to that tantalizing clicking, now and then moving the sending-key just to let the other end know that the instrument had been discovered. In the morning, after carefully returning the box to its hole and covering it over with sand, I called my servants about me, snatched a hurried breakfast, mounted my horse, and started upon a forced march for Algiers.
I arrived here today. In writing you this letter I feel that I am making a fool of myself.
There is no David Innes.
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